This is the final section of my walk on Sunday September 3rd 1989 which had begun in Stratford, from which some images appeared in my web site and self-published book ‘1989’, ISBN: 978-1-909363-01-4, still available. The pictures here are in the order I took them, and almost all of these final images are in the book so you can read my deliberately disjointed thoughts that made up the text on the book pages here. Although this was the end of this walk I returned to the area for another walk a few days later.
Here you can see the buildling where I took a photograph in a earlier post of Eves, a ‘STRICTLY LADIES ONLY HEALTH CLINIC’. The road on the corner at the left of the picture is Eve Rd. As you can read the building was also BeCKS Driving Lessons, BRITAINS LARGEST PRIVATELY OWNED DRIVING SCHOOL FOR CAR & H,,G,V.’.
There are some clues as to the origin of this building, including the intertwined initials J and S but I have been unable to find out more. Currently it is a bookmakers.
Finally I photographed the Noted Eel & Pie House, still present at the start of West Street although the Potato Dealers and Farm Produce shop at left is now an off-licence.
The shop sign for the Eel & Pie House has changed and now spreads across three bays and all those white tiles have been replaced by green and the shopfront also now has a large eel at right.
You can read the history of the shop, with some pictures on their web site. It began with the great grandfather of the current owners who was the skipper of an eel barge sailing out of Heeg, a fishing village in the Netherlands. Eels were exported to London from there until 1938. Around 1894 his youngest son came London at the age of nine to live with a family who owned a pie shop and learn the trade, opening a pie shop in Hoxton with a cousin just before the outbreak of The Great War. He married the daughter of another pie shop owner and in 1926 with a loan from his father-in-law set up his own shop under his father-in-law’s name, E Newton, on Bow Road.
The shop name was changed soon after the outbreak of the Second World War when the Home Office insisted his name as a “friendly alien” had to be on the shop front. It became the “Noted Eel & Pie House” with his name, “H HAK” in the smallest font permitted in the bottom right corner as he worried customers might think it German.
In 1976 when two of his sons were then running the business the shop was compulsory purchased by the council and the business opened in Leytonstone in 1978. I suspect the sign in my picture may have come with them as it doesn’t quite fit and there is a name painted over at bottom right.
This was the final frame exposed on this walk. But I was soon to return to take more pictures in the London Borough of Waltham Forest.
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